Cindy Sheehan says President Trump's allegedly insensitive remarks to the widow of a soldier killed in Niger aren't surprising to her, and that former President George W. Bush had a similarly difficult time with her family after her son Casey's 2004 death in Iraq. Bush's treatment of grieving military family members, including Sheehan, who camped outside his Texas ranch to protest the Iraq War, is upheld frequently as an example for Trump to follow. But Sheehan said Bush's attempt to comfort her family and others was rife with awkwardness and upsetting moments, and said she's "not shocked" to read that...

The images, anecdotes, and videos coming out of Venezuela in the past year have been heartbreaking. Shortages of medicines and basic household supplies, people rummaging through garbage for food, violent clashes, a seemingly hopeless future. The data if anything understate the scale of the catastrophe. Entirely avoidable, the combination of policies and circumstances leading to it have been in place for years. Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard-based Venezuelan economist deemed persona non grata by the government for his fierce criticisms, appeared on Alphachat recently to discuss the sequence of events preceding this cataclysmic economic situation. He also talked listeners through the...

The Venezuelan leader was often marginalized as a radical. But his brand of socialism achieved real economic gains For the last decade in American politics, Hugo Chavez became a potent political weapon - within a few years of his ascent, he was transformed from just a leader of a neighboring nation into a boogeyman synonymous with extremism. Regularly invoked in over-the-top political rhetoric, Chavez's name became a decontextualized epithet to try to attach to a political opponent so as to make that opponent look like a radical. Because of this, America barely flinched upon hearing the news that the Bush...

“From the Soviet Union to Cuba, Venezuela, wherever socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish, devastation and failure. Those who preach the tenets of these discredited ideologies only contribute to the continued suffering of the people who live under these cruel systems…”– President Donald Trump, Sept. 19.A big takeaway from my prior years in ministry is that things aren’t always as they seem. Sometimes people hide dark secrets behind nice smiles and happy faces. Here in the U.S., gobs of sorely misinformed people fantasize about the pie-in-the-sky idea of socialism, having no idea all it does is...

On one level, the saga of Madame Giselle is a story about, in no particular order, allegations by two neighbors who say they were swindled in an elaborate scheme to sell T-shirts to the Venezuelan army, a cash-stuffed envelope slipped under a doorway, a legendary bygone scandal involving the Colombian military and a glamorous woman known as “The Blonde,” an ongoing multimillion-dollar Colombian fraud case, and a supposed helicopter ride into Syria. But on another level, as illustrated in interviews and in hundreds of text messages obtained by The Washington Post, it’s a story about friendship and trust, about what...

Leftists like British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have long had warm words for Venezuela's chavistas. But as famine has racked the country and President Nicholás Maduro has turned dictatorial, those words are coming back to bite them. PAMPLONA, SPAIN—An inspiration, a hero: these are the words leftists in Europe lavished on the late Hugo Chavez for his “Bolivarian revolution” in Venezuela. For British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and left-wing parties like Syriza and Podemos in southern Europe, Chavez’s ascendance was long the clearest challenge to inequality in Latin America, neoliberalism in Washington, and austerity at home. Today, it's a decidedly...

Ken Livingstone, a former mayor of London, has blamed the turmoil in Venezuela on Hugo Chávez’s unwillingness to execute “oligarchs” after he came to power. ... “One of the things that Chávez did when he came to power, he didn’t kill all the oligarchs. There was about 200 families who controlled about 80% of the wealth in Venezuela,” Livingstone told Talk Radio. “He allowed them to live, to carry on. I suspect a lot of them are using their power and control over imports and exports to make it difficult and to undermine Maduro.”

US Ambassador Nikki Haley has called for international action to address the crisis in Venezuela, after a US-backed proposal for regional mediation failed to win support at the Organization of American States. (The US-backed proposal failed to overcome opposition from the 14 similar national jurisdictions that benefit from turmoil and discounted Venezuelan oil.) "The tragic situation in Venezuela calls out for action. The Venezuelan people are starving while their government tramples their democracy". //Snipp// The Judiciary has sold out and military command is wavering as the country, pummeled by the plunge in oil prices and the Hugo Chávez, legacy of...

BARINAS, Venezuela, June 15 (Reuters) - He had just left his office by car and was passing a nearby church when the state security vans swooped in on Wilmer Azuaje. Put on a military plane hours later on May 3, the 40-year-old regional lawmaker - one of the best-known opposition figures in the rural home state of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - has not been seen since.

Bernardo Álvarez Herrera, a longtime ambassador to the United States who led Hugo Chávez’s diplomats in defending Venezuela’s socialist revolution to skeptical foreign governments, died on Thursday in Caracas. He was 60. President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela announced the death but did not give the cause.

Political junkies will recall with a giggle the less than distinguished career of Cynthia McKinney, the six-term congressperson from Georgia who was an embarrassment even to far lefties who are usually immune to embarrassment. (In fact, when she returned to the House in 2005 after having been defeated for re-election in the Democratic primary in 2002, the Democratic House leadership refused to restore her committee seniority. She was defeated again in the Democratic primary in 2006.) Among other things, McKinney was a 9/11 “truther,” and also speculated that the CIA had a role in the killing of rapper Tupac Shakur....

Venezuela’s embattled socialist government is steadily moving the country toward the abyss, and the escalating crisis is taking on increasingly ominous tones. Venezuelans are caught in a fast-spinning economic spiral that has already devastated living standards and created a large-scale humanitarian crisis. But as Venezuelans take to the streets, so far the government has responded with measures that exacerbate tensions and make a peaceful political solution increasingly difficult. President Nicolas Maduro, the heir to the late President Hugo Chavez, was elected by popular vote in 2013. But the Venezuelan system of government can no longer be called a democracy. The...

The Foreign Minister of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez inaugurated the mural along with members of the community, artists and activists from the U.S. and Latin America. Rodriguez was also accompanied by members of the African American community in the Bronx. During the inauguration people shouted, “You can see him, you can feel him! Chavez is present!"

New evidence suggests Iran received help from Venezuela with its nuclear program despite a decade of U.N.-mandated sanctions aimed at curbing the rouge regime’s controversial nuclear and ballistic missile programs. A 2009 document obtained by Brazil’s leading weekly, Veja magazine, shows late dictator President Hugo Chavez signing off on the release of funds to help Iran with its nuclear ambitions. Specifically, the document states the funds were to be designated for the import of equipment for a gunpowder factory and the development of production plants for nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose, elements used in rocket propulsion for Iran’s government. There is also...

In the midst of economic crisis, the government a lot of money is spent on a cake for the "birthday" of Hugo Chavez, in a "celebration" that was held Thursday at the CDLM (Cuartel Mountain, January 23, Caracas) and also it included singers to llanera music. At least 1.20 meters and 90 kilos more ingredients were required for the "architectural replica" of the headquarters of the mountain that ended in the "whiskers" of Nicholas. Below is a list of the budget for the cake of "absent": Kilo of wheat flour: Approximately 2,000 Bolivars (Second-hand in Catia or Petare, by shortages)....

Not long ago, the regime that Hugo Chávez founded was an object of fascination for progressives worldwide, attracting its share of another-world-is-possible solidarity activists. Today, as the country sinks deeper into the Western Hemisphere’s most intractable political and economic crisis, the time has come to ask some hard questions about how this regime — so obviously thuggish in hindsight — could have conned so many international observers for so long.

A humanitarian crisis, the likes of which have never been seen in the Western Hemisphere, is brewing in Venezuela and it will be inevitable in a few weeks. Much has been written recently about the crisis in Venezuela. During the last week, the world’s leading media outlets have amply reported the shortages of food, medicine and other basic supplies in the country. Unfortunately, despite some great reporting by various journalists, the true extent and the reasons for the country’s desperate situation have not yet been clearly understood by the media and the international community. The majority of those reporting on...

Venezuelans struggling through an economic crisis got a rare bit of good news Thursday when the country’s largest brewery announced it had obtained a loan to resume production. Polar breweries, maker of the country’s best-known beer brands, shut down production at its four plants in April, blaming a barley shortage. It said it was unable to import the key ingredient because it could not access dollars under socialist President Nicolás Maduro’s tight currency controls. But with bars and liquor stores running dry, Polar said it had reached a deal for a $35-million loan from Spanish bank BBVA, putting up its...

Venezuelans on Tuesday woke up to discover that the government-controlled price of corn flour -- used to make corn patty arepas, a staple of local cuisine -- has risen 900 percent. The socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro had kept the price of corn flour frozen for 15 months at 19 bolivares a kilogram (two pounds).